Tsul'kalu' - Great Lord of the Hunt

Hidden Giant

 

Drake James Wyvern, that was his name.  The first time I saw him was during fifth grade lunch hour.  I was silently eating my lunch, alone, thinking of Deice Cell Ell I, when a new student, with red hair, wearing a crimson red leather jacket, sat at a table two down from mine.  His voice was loud and raspy, as if the night before, he had preached a fiery sermon down upon someone's head.  He was in the midst of boasting, telling some tall tale to a casual listener or two.  I wondered where he had come from.  I decided upon the West—he must have come from the West.  He seemed totally unaware of the fact that he was an outsider, and that like me, he would always be one.  I found him to be mildly repulsing, though tolerable in his sheer uniqueness, his strangeness.

I next remember Drake James Wyvern being in my middle school home economics class.  He seemed to be obsessed with Axl Rose, and would often become excited, even loud and argumentative, in proclaiming Rose's merits.  It was a popular rumor at the time that Drake James Wyvern threw cats over houses.  I believed the rumors.

One day, while strolling with Harry Jet Sir, Heraldic Liming, and Drake James Wyvern (all of us social outcasts) on the football field of Gravelly Spins, I remember Drake James excitedly talking of X-Men trading cards.  I was as excited by his speaking on this subject as I had been a year or two earlier with his Axl Rose rhetoric.

I did not hear of Drake James Wyvern's strangeness (I do not recall ever seeing him again) thereafter until I came to Snob Rector High School.  I think that Drake James had slate blue eyes, I'm not sure.  I was told by someone that Drake James was taking people up to Devil's Courthouse, a mountain in the Appalachian Mountains of Western North Carolina.  I would later learn that the native Cherokee Indians thought that a cave in Devil's Courthouse was where the slant-eyed giant Judaculla lived.  Judaculla rock, the best known petroglyph site in North Carolina, is near by.  It was said that Drake James Wyvern would only take people to Devil's Courthouse if they first assured him that they were not Christians.  They must first deny Christ.  Wide-eyed whisperers said that cars would stall on the mountain.  I heard several times "LSD" mentioned.  Jim would take his initiates to a certain spot on Devil's Courthouse where, to my horror, it was said that upon an outcropping of rock, the adventurers would be witness to a spectral human sacrifice — they, high-school kids, were the dilated witnesses to a residual haunting—a residual ritual murder.

Judaculla rock's strange markings are thought to have been carved anywhere from the Late Archaic Period (3000-1000 BC) to the early Woodland Period (Sassaman et al), (1000-200 BC).  The Cherokee, for generations, had considered the land sacred.  In recent years, Devil's Courthouse has been used in clandestine twilight initiations by numerous student groups from the nearby Western Carolina University.  It is widely spread amongst students that ceremonies at the rock have provoked many paranormal incidents.  Judaculla lay only a few hundred feet from an old graveyard.  There are reports of strange ghostly noises, eerie illuminations around the stone, and even of UFOs appearing in the clearing above the rock.  It is also said that the Devil himself holds court in Judaculla's cave.

If Drake James Wyvern escaped prison (many I knew did not), I can see him, with the passing of time, blending seamlessly into society, or at least of creating the illusion of doing so, as he did at the cafeteria table.  I suspect that society has demanded him to come out from the darkness of the woods, to settle by the fire, to adopt materialism as as the one true god.  He probably has a decent job, nice clothes, a haircut; he probably changes girlfriends every few months and drinks socially on the weekends.  His old weirding nature may have passed; though he, once a fellow darkling nomad in my mind,  paused there long enough for me to recognize something in him, of me—he aided me in the forming of my own weirding way.  

The night now grows deep, and I am nurtured; sustained by mists.  An ancient lore takes humanoid form, luring those who would follow into the darkened woods. 

   

 

For this 1930s photo, the cryptic markings were filled with chalk. Since this valuable picture was made, the rock has continued to erode, making serious study increasingly difficult.
photo courtesy Jerry Parker